I agree. The ISO format, which is used by every open source developer I've ever seen, is YYYY-MM-DD. Not only does this make sense (the US format is just retarded if you ask me), it also aids alphanumeric sorting. If you have a bunch of files with ISO dates in their names, and you want to sort by these dates, you can set your file viewer to sort alphabetically by name. Your files will be sorted in perfect chronological order.

For example, today (April 5th, 2003) is 2003-04-05. That is to say the international standard date notation is YYYY-MM-DD.

Info at:

ISO: Numeric representation of Dates and Time http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/datesandtime.html
A Summary of the International Standard Date and Time Notation http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html
World Wide Web Consortium: Date and Time Formats http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime
Open Directory: ISO 8601 http://dmoz.org/Science/Reference/Standards/Individual_Standards/ISO_8601/
Etc...

Perhaps you should simply set your LC_DATE settings appropriately so ALL programs that properly localize dates will behave the way you want? Or do you want every single program (including things like ls and whatnot) to have a little pref for this.

In Linux the only locale setting to offer English names with the ISO date and time format is the "joke" locale of en_dk (that's right - English:Denmark). At any rate just set LC_TIME to en_dk, make sure the locale has been generated and Mozilla/Minotaur should take the settings from there (it does for me).

en_dk was created as a bit of a joke...
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-tune.en.html#s-ISO-locale
...which is not to say that it is not useful. I think it has since been submitted as a standard.

Few (if any) other non-anglophone countries have an en_xx locale in Linux, so in that respect the Danish are fortunate to have such a locale available to them. What non-Danes and residents of non-anglophone countries would use if they wanted English I do not know. What is needed is an international English locale packed with as many international conventions as possible in it.

Thanks, what a nice coincidence to have english-speaking danish people :) But this of course shows how broken this way of defining things is - the date format and date language should be seperate things of course. Even in a small country like austria, there are many ways how to display a date in use and the requirement to mix language and format freely should be legitimate. With this way of defining things one is obviously out of luck if there is not by coincidence the combination you need. Windows obviously does it much better here, by clearly seperating these issues. Who is to blame for the silly way of doing this under linux then?

Also a similar difficulty here, for Windows 98. After changing the short date format of the Windows system to the ISO date standard, other programs listen to it, but Mozilla 1.3 doesn't. There are of course many options in the about:config page of the browser, like intl.content.langcode (en-US), but I cannot find an option for date format, not in the prefs.js file either.

Well, maybe I'm missing something, I don't know. Anyway, this point about dates is not a big priority for me, really, although it would be nice to have the international standard, naturally. :)

I've just found that the change of date setting works in the case of both the Windows system and Mozilla using "en-US" (intl.content.langcode option in about:config page and prefs.js file). It does not seem to work for Spanish settings like es-ES, as well set in both Windows system and Mozilla.

Maybe I'm doing some mistake, but anyhow I think this date detail is not too important, although perhaps other international testers will think differently, I don't know. :) I've tested it with Mozilla 1.3 (US English version), given that Minotaur is being based on it.

Yes, I moved to Mozilla from using Opera and Eudora, mainly because of Mozilla Mail/News. For example, Mozilla is standard and good for Asian languages, something that we need. IMHO, currently Mozilla Mail/News only lacks optional deletion of attachments (bug 2920) and some improvements for importing mail and for prefs.js file safety, to be a nearly perfect mail client. :-)

Yes, I moved to Mozilla from using Opera and Eudora, mainly because of Mozilla Mail/News. For example, Mozilla is standard and good for Asian languages, something that we need. IMHO, currently Mozilla Mail/News only lacks optional deletion of attachments (bug 2920) and some improvements for importing mail and for prefs.js file safety, to be a nearly perfect mail client. :-)

Sorry, I've just learned that if one clicks the reload page button for the resulting web page (with messages) of the post form, the post is repeated, even if one clicks "cancel" to the warning about resending form data (using version 1.3). My apologies. :-(